Journal articles on the topic 'Structural adjustment (Economic policy) – Soviet Union'

The role of Western governments in the disintegration of the Soviet Union was complex. The two most important factors that undermined the Soviet state were the deepening economic chaos under Mikhail Gorbachev and the rapid growth of internal political dissent. Western policies tended to magnify both of these factors. This is not to say, however, that Gorbachev's original decision to embark on an economic reform program was simply the result of pressure created by Western defense spending and military deployments. The Soviet economy was plagued by severe weaknesses, of which the misallocation of resources and excessive military expenditures were only a small part. Gorbachev's initial economic reforms were spurred by his awareness of the country's general economic problems. After the first round of reforms failed, he sensed that arms control and reductions in military spending would be helpful for the next stage. Even so, the belated cuts he made in military spending (beginning in 1990) were of relatively little consequence. The West's refusal to pour money into the Soviet system without evidence of structural reform in the last years of the Soviet regime, and Western pressure on Gorbachev not to crack down on political dissent and separatism, did hasten the Soviet collapse. These policies denied the Soviet system resources that might have prolonged its survival, and they helped to deter Gorbachev from using decisive force against elements that were splitting the Soviet Union apart.

This article analyses the current problems of the Soviet economy's reform process. The process of transition to a market economy in the Soviet Union, where an extreme degree of monopoly prevails, has been characterised by declining production and accelerating inflation. The rapid growth of the market sector in the situation of highly distorted and heavily regulated prices, dominance of state enterprises, and unclear property rights, leads to the concentration of entrepreneurial activity mainly in speculative operations involving the redistribution of state property, to the deterioration of the macroeco nomic situation and to the deepening of the structural crisis in the economy. In fact, the growth of the market sector is based mainly on hidden subsidies from the state enterprises.The failure of four years of economic reforms is due to inappropriate economic policy based on mythical ideas about the market economy. Rapid, radical reforms, including large-scale privatisation on the basis of development of financial intermediates, are of crucial importance in overcoming the further deterioration of the economic situation and in preventing the collapse of the Soviet economy.

The paper contains a retrospective analysis of macroeconomic policy and reforms in the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) from 1992 to 2021, after obtaining political and economic independence in 1991. Special attention is given to problems of macroeconomic stabilization and economic growth. As a result of structural distortions inherited from the Soviet economy and the slow pace of economic and institutional reforms, the FSU countries suffered from a long and deep output decline in the 1990s. Their post-transition growth recovery in the 2000s did not last long. Furthermore, they remain vulnerable to both domestic and external economic shocks. Given the limited predictability of post-COVID global economic trends and the damaging consequences of the war in Ukraine, this vulnerability will likely continue in the next couple of years.

Abstract The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) is considered to be the first successful regionalization attempt in the post-Soviet area. It is promoted as an economic organization whose aim is to remove trade barriers, promote integration, cooperation and economic growth in a fragmented and underdeveloped region. The promoters of this organization state that it can represent a platform for dialogue and even cooperation with the European Union, as well as with other international actors. The growing influence of the European Union in the post-Soviet space has been a critical factor in Russia’s determination to update its policy towards regional integration and from the very beginning, the European model was chosen to create the new Union. By doing a comparison between the two regional blocs, I will contribute to a growing literature on the relationship between the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union, by emphasizing the similarities and differences as well as how the emerging regional competition will shape the future of European relations. In the first part of the article, I will briefly present the evolution of the integration process after the fall of the USSR, followed by a comparative analysis of the two regional integration projects, from a structural, political and economic point of view. I will conclude by analyzing the chances for any kind of breakthrough in political relations and economic cooperation between the two blocs. The article follows a qualitative and quantitative methodology and examines the possible implications of a competition between the European Union and Eurasian economic Union.

The paper contains a retrospective analysis of macroeconomic policy and macroeconomic reforms in the post-Soviet countries in 1992—2021, that is, after obtaining political and economic independence at the end of 1991. Special attention is paid to the problems of macroeconomic stabilization and economic growth. As a result of structural distortions inherited from the Soviet economy and slow pace of economic and institutional reforms, the countries of the former Soviet Union suffered from the long and deep output decline in the 1990s, and their post-transition growth recovery in the 2000s did not last long. Furthermore, they remain vulnerable to both domestic and external economic shocks. Given a limited predictability of post-COVID global economic trends, this vulnerability will continue, most likely, in the next couple of years.

In the study of comparative foreign policy, two schools of thought disagree over what accounts for variations in processes and outcomes of foreign policies within and between states. One holds that differences in the characteristics of the countries in question lead to differences in their foreign policies. The other argues that the important differences are not between countries but between issue-areas. A comparison of the Soviet Union and the United States in the issue-area of military policy (in particular, the process of weapons innovation) suggests that the policy processes differ substantially, contrary to what an issue-area approach would predict. On the other hand, the distinctions made by some students of political economy who focus on domestic structures appear to account well for differences between the U.S. and Soviet processes of innovation. The domestic structural approach should be applied to the study of comparative military policy as well as foreign economic policy.

This paper evaluates the advisability of a monetary union in Latin America applying the theory of optimum currency areas (OCA). The analysis is based on the traditional OCA criteria and it suggests that there is no evidence for any monetary integration in Latin America even at a sub-regional level. Latin American countries have evidenced a low degree of trade integration and asymmetric co-movements among their shocks. Moreover, substantial differences in the speed of adjustment and in the size of shocks are found. Hence, higher policy coordination seems to be necessary before starting any economic integration process in Latin America.

Abstract This article focuses on the effects of corrections to the budgetary policy in eurozone economies. The goal of the text is to check if advancement in implementing modern tools of public management is helpful in the time of fiscal adjustment. We assume that the most important role of a performance approach in conducting fiscal policy is the ability of government to implement active policy meant as structural changes in the composition of public expenditures. In the case of the need to cut general levels of public spending, public sector managers who have knowledge of performance effects of public policies should be able to conduct fiscal adjustment in such a way as to minimise negative outcomes of spending correction on society. The structure of the text is as follows. First, we present some insights on the economic effects of fiscal adjustment. Then, we discuss the concept of performance management presented in the theory and policy agendas of international institutions such as the European Union or the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Finally, we present the result of an empirical exercise that is designed to combine the level of advancement in implementing performance budgeting (PB) and the social cost of fiscal adjustment in eurozone economies. The most important finding of the research is that PB tools seem to have very limited usefulness in a time of fiscal adjustment. There is no statistical evidence that countries advanced in utilisation of PB tools conduct more active fiscal policy – approach of cutting all expenditures across the border by given percentage rather than looking at priorities and social outcomes of fiscal adjustment dominates in all cases.

Introduction. Against the background of the destruction of rules and principles of economic development that existed during the Soviet Union, and the struggle for independence, Ukraine has entered a period of profound transformation in all areas of the economy as a whole and individual economic entity. The new level of relations with the external environment and the consequences of the global economic crisis required urgent changes in the form of ownership of production facilities, principles of foreign economic activity, system of state control and taxation, monetary system, approaches to investment and innovation mechanisms. The purpose of this article is study of the causes of transformation processes in the system of food industry enterprises and substantiation of the peculiarities of their development in the conditions of reforming the agricultural sector of the country's economy. Results. The results of the study show that the prerequisites for transformations in the national economy as a whole and in particular, can be structured as follows: reforming the management system of the economy of the post-Soviet space in order to build market relations, the consequences of which make changes to the financial and economic system of the enterprise; Ukraine's integration into international cooperation, focus on EU cooperation, which is an impetus for innovative transformations; the purpose of entrepreneurial activity, which is an incentive to search for new ideas and transformation of business policy. Conclusions. The real preconditions which are an impetus for transformations of the enterprise are defined, namely: the consequences of global economic crises of the period of independence of Ukraine, which require the search for effective mechanisms for their elimination or leveling; reforming the management system of the economy of the post-Soviet space in order to build market relations; European integration and the processes of globalization that stimulate innovative development and related transformations; the goals and objectives of the business of a modern enterprise, which is an incentive to seek new ideas and transform business policy. Keywords: transformation, transformation processes, food industry enterprises, agricultural sector, structural changes.

In december 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. This fact can be considered to be the most significant geopolitical event of the second half of the 20th century. As a result of the collapse of the USSR, fifteen union republics – the main units of the administrative-political and national division of the Soviet federation – gained state sovereignty and independence. One of the most important results of this process was the creation of Russia (Russian Federation), which declared itself and was recognized as the main successor of the Soviet empire. The young state faced many difficulties, which – at the level of internal policy – include carrying out socio-political-economic transformation, overcoming the deep structural crisis inherited from the late USSR, or building modern durable democratic institutions and democratic political culture. This meant that the new Russian elites needed to make a radical system change and to develop new political mechanisms in the management of this enormous country. The article will present the main problems faced by Russia and its establishment in the 1990s, with many turning points and breakthrough moments, specific to countries undergoing intensive and multifaceted post-communist transformation. Due to the importance and the role of Russia in the international system, the directions and tendencies of changes taking place in this country are particularly important, especially from the perspective of post-Soviet states and the countries of the former socialist block.

In 1991 Ukraine became an independent state, abandoned central planning, and started the transformation of its economy. The country inherited a highly monopolised structure of economy from the Soviet Union, therefore demonopolisation and the development of competition have been among the main areas where structural changes were necessary. The present study gives a comprehensive picture of the development of antitrust policy in the Ukraine from 1992 to 2002 through an assessment of evolving competition policy and examination of the policy's implementation. On the one hand, the development of competition policy in the Ukraine included the establishment of rules and appropriate procedures, as well as the creation of a proper institutional framework. On the other hand, the lack of a unified state approach to the reformation of the economy in general and to the problems of the development of competition in particular could be observed. The actions of different state organs were not synchronised, and competition policy in the Ukraine failed to become the main element of the economic policy setup.

I wish to consider the possibility that a good part of the opposition to the main lines of American foreign policy is based on deep-seated objections to the political and economic systems of the United States. This is not to say that existing policy is necessarily wise or that there may not be good and sufficient reasons for wishing to change it. Indeed, at any time and place, the United States might well be overestimating the threat from the Soviet Union or using too much force. What I wish to suggest is that across-the-board criticism of American policy as inherently aggressive and repressive, regardless of circumstance – a litany of criticism so constant that it does not alert us to the need for explanation – has a structural basis in the rise of a political culture that is opposed to existing authority.To the extent that this criticism is structural, that is, inherent in domestic politics, the problem of fashioning foreign policies that can obtain widespread support is much more difficult than it is commonly perceived to be. For if the objection is to American ways of life and, therefore, “to the government for which it stands,” only a transformation of power relationships at home, together with a vast redistribution of economic resources, would satisfy these critics. If the objection is not only to what we do but, more fundamentally, to who we are, looking to changes in foreign policy to shore up domestic support is radically to confuse the causal connections and, therefore, the order of priorities.

The sudden collapse of the centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU), has created economic and environmental disequilibria of historically unprecedented dimensions throughout the region, as well as a process of gradual transition from plan to market. This historical ‘experiment’ provides a unique opportunity to study economyÐenvironment interactions and the adjustment process towards a new equilibrium, as well as the implications for conventional and novel policy instruments under transitional conditions. The changes that have taken place have been so many and so large that they defy many of the tools of marginal analysis. Privatization, industrial restructuring, market competition, price reform, and trade liberalization among others have suddenly been introduced where none existed and have so radically altered the fundamentals of these economies that they could be considered as new economies rather than simply reformed economies. However, underlying these radical changes, are many legacies of the centrally planned economy that persist or change only gradually. Furthermore, not all countries in CEE and the FSU have reformed their economies at the same pace. The northern tier countries of CEE moved faster than the southern tier and the latter faster than most FSU republics.

This article focuses on welfare retrenchment in Portugal by analysing the evolution of public sector employment up until 2013. A multidimensional analysis of the structure of public employment in the Portuguese state was developed, theoretically guided by the ‘hands of the state’ model proposed by Bourdieu, which divides the main functions of contemporary states between its left hand (more redistributive) and its right hand (more rational economic-oriented). Bourdieu’s approach is especially useful in addressing the transformations of the Portuguese public employment between 1979 and 2013, characterized by specific economic, social and political changes. In 2013 ‐ a year in which the adjustment measures agreed by the Portuguese government, the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund during the global crisis were especially intense ‐ we observed the tendency towards the disqualification of public employment and the shrinking of the left hand of the Portuguese state. Public policy orientations in the areas of education and science were particularly troubling, considering the structural backwardness the country faces in these fields in the context of the European Union.

The article deals with the legal and organizational principles of the migration policy of Soviet Ukraine. The authors aim to analyze and characterize the whole range of methods and means of regulating migratory flows used by the Soviet authorities. The article analyzes the components of the Soviet migration policy: the passport system, the controlled and compulsory population movements, the regime of external migration, and the like. It is noted that the migration legal framework was formed without taking into account generally accepted international legal standards. Regulatory acts in the field of regulating the movement of population had one goal – to achieve full control by the state for the movement of a person and subordinate these movements to the interests of the state. The methodological basis of the article consists of the principles of historicity, objectivity, versatility, complementarity and reasonableness. To analyse the development of the migration policy of the Soviet Ukraine, dialectical, chronological, systemic-structural, historical, comparative and other general scientific, as well as special scientific methods according to the subject of research are used. The study finds the main instrument for monitoring and streamlining migration flows in the Soviet Ukraine was the long-standing passport system, and but not the economic policy and human rights and freedoms. The freedom to choose a place of residence has been kept to a minimum. This was in line with the migration doctrine of the Soviet era, which was determined in the All-Union Centre and was reduced to the strict control over the movement of the population, the extreme limited travel abroad. The choice of personality was to be subject to public interests that were understood as the interests of the state. In the last years of the Soviet Union's its most odious limitations gradually weakened, but only marginally. State interests were motivated by a number of diverse controlled displacements. However, the authors prove that the desire to strictly regulate migration processes by the Soviet authorities was not fully realized. Firstly, organized resettlement had never been a dominant form of displacement of the population in the USSR, even during the most rigid totalitarian regime. Secondly, a significant part of the organized resettlement ended with the return of migrants to their former residence or relocation to another place. The authors draw attention to the fact that the constituent part of the migration policy of the Soviet Ukraine was the forced migration, which was carried out in the form of deportation of entire ethnic groups. Such voluntarist events have affected millions of different nationalities, and Ukraine has been experiencing their results to this day. Thus, the authors conclude that at the time of Ukraine's independence proclaimed, migration policy and its institutes in Ukraine were in fact absent, which is explained by the presence of only a surrogate statehood and the predominance of administrative methods over political management of migratory flows.

The aim of the paper is to recognize the level of employment and gross value added (GVA) in agriculture in relation to the other sectors of the European Union economy. The following research tasks were formulated: analysis of employment levels and GVA in the sectors of economy in 2000 and 2018 as well as the relationship between employment and GVA, assessment of GVA per 1 person employed in the investigated sectors and its changes in the analysed years, and assessment of the scale of surplus employment in agriculture assuming that GVA per 1 person employed in this sector would be equal to the average level reached in the industry and the services sectors. Comparative analysis and the deduction method were used in the study. Correlation coefficients between the level of employment in individual sectors and GVA per 1 person employed in the time series covering the years 2000–2008 were also calculated. A new measure of the “goal” of employment reduction in agriculture has been proposed, related to the measurement of the distance between agriculture and other sectors in terms of GVA generated per 1 employed—the Excess Employment Rate In The Agricultural Sector (EERAS). The research was based on EUROSTAT data from the years of 2000 and 2018. The process of changes in the sectoral structure of employment will probably be determined by the growth rate of demand for services, structural adjustment referring to matching the characteristics of the agricultural population to the demand for labour force in the services sector and the pace of structural transformations in rural areas. Rationalisation of employment levels in agriculture promotes improvement of its economic and social sustainability. Instruments based on financial transfers from nonagricultural sectors to agriculture should play a secondary role, since they are a burden to more efficient sectors, and in the long term, they may hinder reduction of employment in agriculture. However, due to the inevitable differences in productivity observed between agriculture and the nonagricultural sectors, at a technologically, economically, ecologically and socially justified level of employment in agriculture, transfers of the surplus generated in the secondary and tertiary sectors need at least to reduce, if not eliminate, economic consequences of these differences.

This paper presents price transmission models explaining the farm-to-retail price spread and degree of competition in the meat marketing chains during the period of economic transition in Slovenia. The meat marketing chains in Slovenia are characterised by relatively large processing and marketing margins, which are expected to decline with market deregulation and integration into the international markets. As results of the economic restructuring and policy reforms, competitive market pressures in a marketing margin determination have increased, inducing pressures for efficiency improvements in the vertical market integration from the farm to the retail stage in the Slovenian meat sector. Co-integration models are applied to estimate vertical market integration and to assess the degree of price competition in the Slovenian beef and pork marketing chains. The tested econometric models confirmed the existence of the long run market integration in the meat chain and the speed of adjustment of price changes. Farm-gate meat prices are identified as weakly exogenous, indicating the crucial role of supply side processing and marketing factors in the retail meat price determination. The results of structural tests suggest a long-run mark-up price strategy in the beef, and a competitive price strategy in the pork, chain as the outcome of policy reforms. The increased competitive market pressures are very likely to increase efficiency in the beef markets. Efficiency improvements in the Slovenian food markets are needed in the increased competitive market pressures of the enlarged European Union markets.;

The analysis of historical experience of development and protection of competition is carried out in the context of history of development of economic relations, formation and development of the Antimonopoly legislation and practice of its application. Ensuring the development and protection of competition is evaluated taking into account the values and philosophies, the development of economic doctrines, based on the ongoing changes in the economy and technological shifts. More than a thousand years of experience of antimonopoly regulation in India, the Roman Empire and Byzantium is summarized. The antitrust experience of the United States revealed based on the analysis of history of development of economic relations in the country studies of the background of the U.S. antitrust laws in the late XIX century describes the main conditions and precedents of the application of the antitrust laws of the United States, the major structural changes in the economy in the XX century. Examples of adjustment of priorities of antitrust policy of the USA in the conditions of dynamic changes in the XXI century are given. The main stages of the millennial history of market relations in Russia are considered, including the analysis of the most important monuments of Russian history (Russkaya Pravda 1016, Kormchaya kniga 1274, the Cathedral Code of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich 1649). The basic Antimonopoly provisions of the decrees of the Peter I era, which initiated the formation of the Antimonopoly legislation and the development of competition, the Antimonopoly norms of the Criminal and Correctional Penalties Act of 1845, approved by Nikolay I for half a century of the appearance of antitrust legislation in the United States, are investigated. The history of the development of organized trade during the development of the Russian North, Siberia and the Far East, the practice of countering the monopolization and cartelization of the economy of pre-revolutionary Russia are studied. The reasons and mechanism of monopolization and cartelization of the Russian and the Soviet economy after 1917 are revealed. The ideologies of socialism and capitalism and the reasons for their isolation from the practice of economic development are assessed. The practice of formation and development of economic relations in the Soviet period is investigated.

The article deals with the problem of increasing the regions’ role in international and foreign economic cooperation of the Soviet Union in 1955–65. The aim of the research is to study the dynamics of the visits of foreign countries’ leaders to Sverdlovsk Oblast, which was traditionally considered as “closed.” Based on the results of the study, the stages of diplomatic activity in the region are identified. It was found that 1955–59 and 1963–65, when 18 visits of leaders of capitalist, socialist and developing countries to Sverdlovsk Oblast were organized and held, were the most eventful periods in this regard. The programs of the visits to the territory of the oblast were analyzed. Based on the results of the analysis, the average length of stay in Sverdlovsk Oblast, the preferred period for a trip to the Middle Urals, and general principles and features of organizing the reception of eminent guests in Sverdlovsk Oblast were determined. It was revealed that the Sverdlovsk Oblast Committee of the CPSU approved a list of 64 institutions which were recommended for foreign delegations to visit. The article highlights the key objects and facilities that were shown to foreign guests. It was found that the main point of the program of almost all delegations was a visit to Uralmash. Foreign guests also visited other industrial enterprises, including those which were located within the 40–50 km radius of the administrative center of the region, the city of Sverdlovsk. The article reveals the importance of the role assigned to the cultural program (visiting the Geological Museum and theaters). Sojourn in Sverdlovsk Oblast allowed eminent guests to see the potential of one of the country’s industrial centers in person and facilitated placing orders in the oblast for the needs of the economy of foreign countries. In addition, an ideological task was solved: the peaceful stance of the Soviet Union which possessed powerful defense potential was demonstrated to the guests. The author concludes that the involvement of the USSR’s regions in the processes of international cooperation was effective. At the same time, the adjustment of the country’s foreign policy in the mid-1960s was marked by a trend towards a decrease in the number of trips of foreign countries’ top officials to the regions of the USSR, including Sverdlovsk Oblast, within the framework of official and working visits.

Vasiliy A. Anikin – PhD in Economics, Associate Professor, Faculty of Economic Sciences, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Social Policy, National Research University Higher School of Economics; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences. Address: of. 4331, building 4, 26, Shabolovka St., Moscow, 119049, Russian Federation. E-mail: vanikin@hse.ru Citation: Anikin V. (2017) The New Russia? Yes. Comment on Recent Findings From ‘Is New Russia New?’. Mir Rossii, vol. 26, no 4, pp. 51–70. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2017-26-4-51-70 This paper addresses the general question raised in the recent study ‘Is New Russia New?’ (2016). The author of this article develops the idea that new Russia is new. He argues with some of the findings of the considered study. The main points are as follows: the changes in Russia are better understood within a transitional discourse; the unique way of Russia is to constitute a Democratic Power integrated within a European civilization; the ‘statist’ path of Russia is not a curse, but a tunnel of opportunities for social solidarity; the social structure of Russia is mostly based on income stratification and class elements, which are likely to coexist with post-industrial traps, like unskilled labor, or the precariat; the human development of Russia is higher than in the Soviet Union, though its growth has reached saturation point; neoliberal policy is a kind of new rut for Russia, which crucially obstructs the structural reforms and perspectives for its successful transition towards the informational age that has yet to arrive.

Background: The European Union health policy agenda stresses the importance of environmental and qualitative factors in structural hospital reforms. In response to the economic crisis, both cost containment and performance improvements of the Greek hospital sector, have become a pertinent issue for overall reforms.Objective: The study examines the efficiency of 112 Greek public hospitals, by applying bootstrapping techniques and investigating the effect of contextual factors on hospital efficiency. Furthermore, the effect of qualitative evidence, on hospital efficiency is explored by focusing on a subset of 28 large hospitals.Methods: The quality aspects of the Greek hospitals are investigated by applying two models of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), augmented by bootstrapping techniques, in order to assess the importance of quality dimensions on the efficiency of hospital scores. In addition, two Tobit regression models are estimated assessing the contribution of contextual factors, in the efficiency and bias-corrected efficiency scores.Results: Efficiency analysis indicated that only 23.2% of the hospitals are fully efficient (0.96-1.00), 37.5% are efficient (0.71-0.95) while 39.3% are inefficient (0.30-0.70). The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, between the original and the bootstrap-corrected efficiency, indicates that their distributions are significantly different (p-value < .001). The environmental factors, influencing efficiency, are Occupancy Rate and the ratio between Outpatient Visits and Inpatient Days. Results indicate that the inclusion of Risk-Adjustment Mortality Rate significantly influences (p-value < .05) the efficiency of the hospitals.Conclusions: In the era of economic crisis, the inclusion of quality variables and the use of bootstrapping techniques provide a vital framework in assessing the efficiency of the hospital sector.

The global strategy of the United States is characterized by a great degree of continuity, adherence to basic ideas of American ideology, aims, tasks, and the methods of realization of national American interests, though different administrations bring tactical minor changes to the real policy and official rhetoric. Similar trend is seen when we describe and analyze the US strategy towards Russia. The hypothesis of the author is the following: American policy towards Russia has been developing within a quite clear historical paradigm of confrontational competition; American actions do not depend on whether the Russian State exists as the USSR or the Russian Federation. The dominant factor defining this kind of confrontational strategy is that Russia remains one of the leading world powers that is playing a very influential role in international relations and the world order formation, demonstrates an opposite to American view of global governance and world development. In the US, it is seen as a serious obstacle to the realization of the American concept of world liberal order – a monocentric /US centric world order. Restoration by Russia of a great power status after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has not been fully predicted and is unacceptable to the US, and first of all, to the ruling political elite. Opposition and criticism of Russia has been growing since 1995, and in the 2010s the deterrence of Russia evolved into a new cold war. Cold war confrontation between the US and Russia during the Trump administration became large scale and multifaceted, and could be characterized as a political, economic, and information war. There is a quite clear consensus on the Russia issue between the representatives of Congress, political parties and the groups of interest, mass media and think tanks, the representatives of intelligence community and some federal agencies. The article suggests the analysis of the views and recommendations of the leading think tanks as their influence on the policy towards Russia has been quite visible during all administrations. Though the Trump administration is in opposition to practically all liberal media (the majority of all mass media) and think tanks, the policy of the United States towards Russia is being formulated within the traditional paradigm. The author suggests a structural realist school of thinking as the most relevant for the better understanding of the situation in the Russian-American relations.

The article analyzes the issue of the Middle East security. The Arab countries are facing a lot of regional threats and a fundamental shift in the regional security system, which has become one of the basic variables for the Middle East through the transition to a new form of regional and international interactions. The existence of mutual influences between the nature of the international system and the regional order of the Middle East and the Gulf region is already considered as an incubator for all intractable conflicts and crises. We cannot study the concept of regional security in separate from the global effects and repercussions. After the end of the Cold War and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the structural transformations and global changes led to the emergence of profound changes in the international system, which resulted in the restructuring of the general features of the international environment. The international transformation is marked by the fact that the new world order increased the chances of emergence of new international powers in both Europe and Asia, whether countries or major economic or political blocs trying to establish a multi-polar international order, which prompted the United States to pursue a policy of cooperation with competing powers. And in light of this international environment, it was natural for the regions of strategic importance, particularly the Middle East, to be affected because they were linked to relations of mutual influence with the international system, as international balances affect regional balances.

As part of implementing national development projects of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2030, a special place is given to student sports as a factor ensuring formation of active participants in social interactions. At this, special emphasis is placed on popularization of domestic sports, especially sambo, as a national treasure of Russia. All this actualizes the question of finding promising ways to develop student sambo, both at the federal and regional levels. Taking into account the indicated relevance, the search for promising directions for the development of student sambo in the Chuvash Republic was considered as the purpose of the study. Based on a retrospective analysis of archival data and periodical publications, some aspects and stages in the development of student sambo in the Chuvash Republic were identified for the first time, and a promising direction in its development was scientifically substantiated. In the context of the stated purpose of the study, its main methods were the analysis and generalization of data from archival sources, publications in periodicals, information from scientific and methodological literature and Internet sources. Based on a systematic approach, the authors consider student sambo in Chuvashia as a structural component of the Russian student sports system, which is an important element of the international student sports system. A brief historical insight of the international student sports movement is presented. Some aspects of student sports formation in the Russian Empire and the USSR are considered. Formation in 1957 of the voluntary student sports society “Burevestnik” is noted to be a consequence of the state policy in the field of physical culture and sports movement in the period of the 1930s – 1950s. However, taking into account the changed socio-economic conditions, in 1993 it was reorganized into the Russian Student Sports Union, which served as an impetus for creating its republican branch. The contribution to popularization and development of sambo within the framework of the republican Russian Student Sports Union by its first head, the head of Physical Education and Sports Department at I.N. Ulianov Chuvash State University, Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, Professor O.A. Markiyanov is evaluated. Based on the retrospective analysis of research materials, the stages in student sambo formation and development in Chuvashia in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods are considered in the chronological order. Statistical data on participation of Chuvash sambo students in competitions at the republican, All-Russian and international levels are given. Attention is focused on the fact that creation of the All-Russian Student Sambo League had a significant importance in the development of student sambo in Russia in general and in Chuvashia in particular. Under its auspices, not only various sambo championships and championships among students were organized, but also mutual contacts between universities of the country cultivating the domestic type of wrestling were intensified. The results of the study supplement the regional history with information on evolvement and development of student sambo in Chuvashia in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. They can be used in training specialists in the field of physical culture and sports, as well as in advanced training courses. The results of the study can be taken into account when making some managerial decisions on the development of student sports at the regional level. Generalization of the source data based on a systematic approach gives grounds to state that student sambo of Chuvashia, having passed the stages of evolvement and development, has already acquired its own system organization. At this, it is a structural element of regional and Russian student sports. In this regard, it is concluded that further dynamic development of student sambo in Chuvashia, as a system-based construct, is possible provided its “openness” increases. In this vein, a practical recommendation is formulated.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1991s Central Asian nations and Japan established diplomatic relations and partnerships began to increase steadily as manifested by the level of official contacts. In 1997 the “Silk Road” Diplomacy concept was formulated for Japan’s policy toward Central Asia. At the beginning of the 21st century, we see the activation of new actors including India, Korea, and Japan in Central Asia, which were mainly welcomed in the region. Tokyo recognized the growing strategic importance of Central Asia in the context of international security and sought to play a more active role as an Asian nation in Eurasia. During two decades Central Asian nations and Japan began to increase steadily. Japan is one of the largest assistants to Central Asia in structural reforms and Japanese investments in the different aspects of the region's economy and transport communication add up to several billion. There are several areas of special interest to Japan in its relations with Central Asia, including cooperation in education, economic development of the region, political reforms, as well as energy resources. Japan’s effort in creating the “Central Asia plus Japan” dialog is part of its multilateral diplomacy. At the same time, there are some challenges and problems in Central Asia–Japan relations. However, there are potentialities for future bilateral and multilateral relations. Japan like Korea, India, and other countries has a strong positive image in Central Asia, which could be regarded as an additional factor for fostering partnerships between Central and East Asia as well as interregional relations with the vast Asian continent and beyond. This article explores the interests of the Central Asian states as members of the SCO, and their compatibility with the SCO goals. This study shows that the SCO is compatible with the Central Asian states' security and economic interests, regional cooperation, and the need for balanced relations with the great powers— China, Russia, and the United States.

This publication examines the initial legislative consolidation of the activities of merchants, intermediaries, agents, brokers as the initial types of commercial intermediaries. We covered the most significant periods of Kievan Rus, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, the first decade of Ukraine as an independent state, as well as explored the scope of regulatory consolidation of the institution of mediation in domestic law at present. To achieve this purpose, the author analyzed the works of famous historians and lawyers, as well as developed regulations of the period of the Russian Empire, the USSR and Ukraine. Based on the analysis of the latter, it was determined that the legislation on commercial intermediation is moderately developed in our country, which is absolutely consistent, because in private law relations in the field of business only practice can show their sufficient or insufficient level of regulation. Also to achieve this purpose, the authors used methods typical of legal science. The study itself was conducted primarily on the application of historical and legal, system-structural methods and the dialectical method of cognition of legal reality. The study allows us to conclude that commercial intermediation, arising as a completely natural phenomenon designed to regulate trade relations between individuals, the legislative regulation of commercial intermediation in the field of management has developed gradually. The need for it was due to the fact that the need for professionalism of intermediaries allowed the latter to ignore the usual human virtues, which put at a disadvantage financial and economic position of the principals. This institution received a certain stagnation during the existence of the USSR, which was a logical continuation on the one hand of the policy of nationalization of fixed assets, and on the other - the equality proclaimed by communism, which did not fit private commercial mediation as a form of chrematism and “art of enrichment”.

Introduction. In recent decades, the issue of security has remained very acute and most pressing in modern international relations. Security is the key word that defines domestic and foreign policies of states in both the Caucasus region and a number of European regions. In the late 80s of the 20th century, the collapse of the Soviet Union was painful, accompanied by the economic collapse, the rupture of socio-economic and political ties, awakening of national identity, which often took the form of nationalistic character. Painful processes took place in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, in the Caucasus, which flamed with conflicts. Owing to ethno political conflicts new state formations appeared. Methods and materials. This article uses a set of methods for studying international politics, mainly the comparative, systemic, structural and functional ones, as well as methods for analyzing and processing documents, including content analysis. The use of the conflictological paradigm is the main methodological tool of this study. The authors also use the case study method for studying various conflicts (Georgian-Ossetian conflict, in Cyprus, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Transdniestria, etc.). The article analyzes the UN Resolutions, treaties, and memorandums relating to the non-use of force in the Georgian-Ossetian conflict and conflicts in Europe. Analysis. One of the key aspects of regional security in the system of international relations is the issue of signing the Treaty on the Non-Use of Force. This issue has also been discussed at the official site – the Geneva meetings. The South Caucasus is an unstable, conflict-prone region with many problems. Here interests of both world and regional players collide, which cannot influence stability and security in regional international relations positively. Moreover, new challenges are swaying the situation, in particular, in the form of world terrorism and wars in the neighboring Middle East. Each of the countries located in the South Caucasus is fully aware of the need for stable peace and security in the region, but, at the same time, they do not have a common opinion on the issues relating to the mechanisms for achieving this state. As regards, in particular, the Georgian-Ossetian relations, the situation is aggravated by the foreign policy of these countries – while Georgia is taking steps towards European integration and joining NATO, South Ossetia is more and more integrated into the socio-economic and political legal components of the Russian Federation, denoting its strategic partnership with Russia as a guarantee of its own security. Results. The examples of conflicts in Europe and the Georgian-Ossetian conflict analyzed in the article show that the Agreements on the nonuse of force could serve as a basis for the cease-fire, divorce of the warring parties and the beginning of preparing a platform for the negotiation process. Nevertheless, there is not unequivocal answer to the question of whether such agreements are a guarantee that one of the parties may not violate the agreement and hostilities will not resume again.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to assess how the recent financial and economic crisis has affected European Union (EU) member states’ ability to attract intellectual capital. The issue was found to be relevant, as one of the key elements of competitiveness today is the ability to attract intellectual capital and the question how the recent financial and economic crisis has changed this ability of EU member states can be asked. The question is relevant in relation to the diversity of effects that the crisis had on EU member states, including, the different levels of real economy adjustment constraints. Design/methodology/approach – The concept of competitiveness applied by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in constructing the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) was used. Based on selected WEF GCI sub-indicators and the WEF’s methodology, we a new index named “Ability to attract intellectual capital” was generated. EU member states’ performance was compared along this indicator for the 2007-2008 (pre-crisis) and the 2013-2014 (post-crisis) periods. In this way, EU member states can be ranked before and after the crisis; their performance can be compared in the two periods, relatively to each other, and in relation to their performance along other relevant indices. Findings – The findings show interesting results. First, many peripheral EU member states, deeply affected by the crisis, could considerably improve their relative positions between 2007 and 2013. Second, the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries show a rather mixed picture, drawing up rather different individual development paths. Third, the advancements in some countries do not imply that overall convergence is proceeding in the EU. Nevertheless, some countries have not wasted the “good” crisis to take those steps of structural reform. Research limitations/implications – Because we only look at two time periods (pre-and post-crisis), the authors are not able to describe the processes that were going on in the EU member states during the years of the crisis; the results can only show the difference between the two periods. Furthermore, there may be other methodological approaches to countries’ abilities to attract intellectual capital that may bring results different from this study’s results. For the countries who, according to our investigations, could improve these abilities, enhanced competitiveness is likely to occur in a few years’ time. Practical implications – For those countries aiming at improving their abilities to attract intellectual capital, or for EU policy design, this research may provide useful results. Moreover, not only this study’s results but also the methodology can be used by others, for other purposes: to compare different years, different sets of countries included in the WEF GCI or even along different dimensions. Social implications – This study’s research findings, the authors believe, will help EU member states and the EU as a whole in getting to know their abilities to attract intellectual capital better. In the introductory part of this paper, the aim was also to collect arguments from the economic theory to explain why such abilities are crucial for future competitiveness of countries. Originality/value – The methodology that was used is the adoption of WEF methodology, and the data are from the WEF GCI dataset. However, to the authors’s knowledge, no other research work has applied this methodology on this set of WEF GCI sub-indicators, with such purposes as to compare EU member states’ abilities to attract intellectual capital before and after the crisis.

Ukraine, choosing its strategic course of integration into the European Union, took the time to accelerate the reform of various spheres of socio-political and economic life of the country, in particular, the sphere of tourism services, transforming it into the standards of the European Union. The world-wide experience of progressive management gives tourism the first place among other sectors of the economy in terms of exports of goods and services. In conditions of development of the Ukrainian state, tourism becomes an effective means of forming a market mechanism of management, the receipt of significant funds to the state budget, one of the forms of rational use of free time, conducting meaningful leisure, studying the history of the native land, attracting the general population to the knowledge of the historical and cultural heritage. Current experience and scientific research show that accelerated development of rural green tourism can play the role of a catalyst for structural adjustment of the economy, provide demographic stability and solve urgent socio-economic problems in rural areas. It is important for Ukraine to overcome the gap in this area and realize the existing rich tourism potential through an elaborate policy of state regulation, including at the regional level. One of the reasons for the rapid development of rural green tourism in Europe is the crisis in the agricultural sector. Today, the process of productivity and automation of agriculture leads to jobs reduction. In fact, in many rural regions of Europe, agriculture has ceased to be the most important form of land use and the most important activity of the rural community. The rural green tourism is closely linked with other types of tourism, primarily with recreational, cultural, specialized tourism types – relief, gastronomy, ethno-tourism, etc. All this allows rural tourism to be included in combined tours, increasing the demand for a traditional tourist product. The rural green tourism in Ukraine is a holiday of the inhabitants of the city in the countryside in guest rooms created by a village family on the basis of its own residential house and private plot. As entrepreneurial activity, rural green tourism develops rather heterogeneously in different regions of Ukraine. Systematization of motivational interests of the rural green tourism activation in the regions of Ukraine showed that the dominant motives for diversification of activities in agricultural sector in the current conditions of rural areas development are: increase of incomes of rural population and increase of employment level, the possibility of diversification of income sources of peasants, significant investments and additional training, opportunities for self-realization of rural inhabitants. Priority directions of development of green tourism in these regions in the near future should be: reception and accommodation of tourists; rental of tourist equipment; production and sale of tourist goods of folk crafts; provision of tourist services (bicycle, gastronomy, agrotourism, cultural and historical tourism, organization of recreational recreation, mountain and ecological tourism); organization of tasting and culinary excursions; active development of the hotel business, camping (construction of agricultural cottages, fishing houses, farmhouses, horse farms); organization of historical and ethnographic events; distribution of religious tours; providing a complex of widely distributed services (fishing, hunting, picking berries and mushrooms, medicinal plants, etc.); development and popularization of water sports (kiting, windsurfing). The research of the current conditions for the development of green tourism in the regions of Ukraine allowed to outline the area of the key problems that hinder the active expansion of this type of activity: - disorderly legislation on key aspects of tourism business regulation in rural areas; lack of a law regulating this type of activity; - low level of development of the infrastructure of the market of green tourism services and social infrastructure of the village; - outdated stereotypes of rural residents, which hinder the active development of the newest types of tourism industry, the pronounced unsystematic and irregular nature of services; - absence of state programs supporting development of green tourism and limited amount of their financial, consulting and information-marketing support; - low level of informatization and popularization of green tourism in the regions of Ukraine among the population of European countries; - lack of political stability and social tension in society, deterioration of the world image of Ukraine. Thus, Ukraine has a rather powerful potential for the development of green tourism as an alternative type of agribusiness in the regions of Ukraine. In the context of modern economic conditions, solving key problems of development of green tourism forms the fundamental framework for addressing the most important socio-economic issues of rural areas: overcoming unemployment, promoting employment, raising incomes and quality of life for rural inhabitants.

<p>Urbanization is an important demo-geographical process and a complex social phenomenon under impact of which changes are made not only to the global, regional or national settlement systems, but all socio-economic processes are also substantially transformed. Changes caused by urbanization have an impact on traditional way of life, cultural particularity, community and individual psychology and other aspects of spiritual life, therefore expressions and regularities of this process might be of interest not only for demographers, geographers and economists, but also for representatives of the field of humanities.</p><p>Paper presents the progress of urbanization processes in Latgale, by covering the period from establishment of the first urban-type settlements in the Eastern Latvia until today, when under impact of the depopulation processes number of inhabitants in all cities of the region decreases dramatically. Particular attention is paid to the course of formation and evolution of the Latgale urban network, successively looking at characteristics of the course of urbanization process during all major stages of the historical process.</p><p>Towns and cities constitute the basis for the Latvian population system, characterized by historically formed relatively dense urban network. Like elsewhere in the country, also in modern Latgale towns and cities are distributed evenly throughout the region area, but historically it has not always been so. Urban spatial and landscape model in Latgale has been developed within the long historical process of gradual accumulation of changes in the landscape space; however the balance of this process is destroyed by sudden transformations of political, economic and socio-cultural conditions the region and its people have had to survive in more than one occasion.</p><p>The article particularly deals with characteristics of the urbanization processes during post-Soviet period, outlines the present urban development trends in Latgale, and highlights major urban demo-geographical problems, among which the emphasis has to be placed on the rapid depopulation, an ageing population and the deepening of territorial inequalities, also intra-regionally.</p><p>Structural economical changes and increasing mobility of population during the post- Soviet period have changed the urban development perspective. Activities based on new knowledge are concentrated in large agglomerations, while individual regions, including Latgale, with less competitive urban centers are noticeably lagging behind in their development.</p><p>Therefore, exactly in these areas and localities it is necessary to strengthen the urban functions to impede also interregional migration of population, since it substantially restricts the functionality of the most remote and underdeveloped areas and hinders provision of services to population at an appropriate level. This is even more important since implementation of the cohesion principles has been proclaimed to be one of the cornerstones of the European Union regional policy.</p><p>Unfortunately, at least for the time being situation in urban areas of Latgale is far from encouraging - negative net migration and negative natural growth factor, persistently high level of unemployment is observed there, social exclusion and apathy prevailing. Admittedly, in recent years urban development in Latgale represents also several positive trends. Urban environmental quality has improved significantly, which is generally associated with transition to environmentally more friendly fuels and implementation of various environmental projects, based on funding from the EU budget, such as municipal waste management, improving of water supply and sewerage systems.</p><p>Encouragingly, facilities of regional higher education institutions improve, and the capacity of scientific work increases, important interdisciplinary research has been launched. In the nearest future significant educational and scientific infrastructure improvement projects at the University of Daugavpils and Rezekne Higher Education Institution are planned to be made, which will certainly increase competitiveness of the Latgale region in the science and technology area.</p><p>Article is based on review of comprehensive scientific literature and analysis of available statistical information. The author does not claim to provide all-inclusive and in-depth analysis of the urbanization processes in Latgale, since this task would be performed in course of further studies, but summarizes the results obtained at an early stage of research of urban areas and population demo-geographical development, as well as of the quality of urban environment.</p>

It is proved that for effective state regulation of industry it is necessary to pursue a clear, high-quality and purposeful state industrial policy. To do this, we should use the full range of available mechanisms and tools. In the course of the research it was established that industrial policy means a set of measures of state regulation of economic processes at the sectoral and corporate levels, aimed at stimulating innovation activity, structural adjustment of the economy and economic growth. The necessity of pursuing the new industrial policy, which can be defined as a policy of maintaining competitiveness, is substantiated. It is determined that the process of state regulation of industry is a set of actions of the state as an institution used to influence the activities of economic entities (enterprises, corporations, entrepreneurs, etc.), as well as certain aspects of this activity related to acquisition of factors of production, organization of production, distribution and sale of goods and services in all phases of the life cycle of the business entity and the life cycle of its products. State regulation based on industrial policy has both positive and critical statements, the essence of which depends on the subject under discussion, namely, policy as a set of state measures and policy as a means to achieve political goals. It is proposed to allocate a list of new conditions for the implementation of effective state regulation of industry on the basis of state industrial policy, which form the conceptual basis of the new industrial policy. The main (basic) characteristics of state regulation of industry on the basis of traditional and new industrial policy are given, where the scenarios of traditional (vertical) policy and new (horizontal) policy are based. Based on the analysis of the practice of state regulation of industry in the European Union, priority areas of regulation have been identified, namely: increasing competitiveness through the development of new markets; strengthening of innovative activity, development of knowledge-intensive businesses; accelerating the process of restructuring companies and industries; improving the institutional and legislative environment; protection of intellectual and property rights; improving the quality and skills of the workforce.

Spurred by global institutions and treaties such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its’ bantling the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the past three decades have seen many nations of the world develop an economic interconnectedness that parallels the great free trade movement of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Free trade and the resultant economic ‘globalisation’ have had mixed results for many countries and groups within countries and has incited a complex, inarticulate, and sometimes contradictory debate across all segments of our society. Some groups and geographical locales have benefited handsomely from the structural changes that we generally understand as globalisation, whilst other groups and geographical regions have become economically marginalised through disconnectedness from global flows of money and goods and services. Rural and regional Australia, for instance, has experienced a steady decline in recent years and in fact in rural Victoria, a gloomy report from the Bureau of Statistics, suggests that not one new full-time job has been created in more than thirteen years (Colbatch). In other parts of the country, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, things could not seem better; property values have doubled, unemployment is at record lows, and the new middle classes cram the cafés of the gentrified inner-cities. Wages have risen by up to fifty percent in many of Australia’s inner cities during the late 1990s (Birnbauer and Gurrera). By the end of the 1990s, in response to some of the inequalities of globalisation—particularly between developed and developing countries—a large globally-linked protest movement arose out of Seattle in the United States. The movement formed as a protest against the policies of the WTO and was an eclectic arrangement of political groups who believed that free trade was not the answer to a more equitable world. The problem was that some of the leading thinkers of the movement—in a movement that claimed to have no leaders—were far too short-sighted to see beyond the popular zeitgeist of the time. The turn of the century zeitgeist was based on a well-meaning utopian-libertarian vision of a frictionless and equitable world. The problem was that this vision had no place for nations and thus citizen-based democratically elected national governments. There had apparently been a coup and governments were now captured by shoe manufacturers. One of the best-known authors of the turn of the century globalisation protest movement was the inner-city Canadian journalist Naomi Klein with her popularly acclaimed book No Logo (Klein). Although shrewdly timed, there was nothing particularly ground-breaking about Klein’s work; anxieties about corporate power, exploited workers, and the power of the ideologically potent media industries have for most of the Twentieth Century been the focus of relations between governments and the private sphere everywhere. The book relied heavily on the popular journalistic branding of the time, the ‘new economy’, which was believed to be represented by the industries of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector, advertising, and shoe manufacturers. The new economy never existed; it was merely a popularly accepted business-journalism term that perhaps described parts of the more complex corpus of work on ‘post-industrialism’. Many thinkers have been attempting to understand issues of equity and post-industrialism for more than three decades; perhaps one the best-known authors in Australia is the ex-Labor minister Barry Jones with his celebrated 1982 book Sleeper Wake; Technology and the Future of Work (Jones). The turn of the century globalisation protest movement was in essence a utopian-libertarian movement and even at times claimed to be ‘natural’ and ‘leaderless’. Pithily, the WTO could also be described as ‘utopian-libertarian’ as much of its post-war ideological base stems from the belief that national borders are a hindrance (and the world would be better without them), and national governments should not interfere with its ‘natural’ globalisation schema. The ‘global’ just like the ‘nation’ is an unwieldy meta-structure and can be interpreted in many ways and for many ends. The minimal working definitions of globalisation, or dare I say ‘globalism’, circulate around the processes in which complex interconnections are said to be rapidly developing between societies, institutions, cultures, collectives, and individuals worldwide. These connections are believed to be between cultural, political, and economic practices that are local, national, technological, and corporate. And if there really is such a thing as globalisation, then it is far from a ‘natural’ process, but has developed as the direct result of strategic choices by governments and corporations in the past thirty years. In Australia, our engagement with the dominant form of globalisation was exacerbated by the Hawke/Keating Labor governments (1984-1996) that deregulated large portions of the economy, floated our currency, and embraced the all-trade-is-good mantra of global economic policy. Not surprisingly, the rich countries define the dominant ideologies of globalisation and corporations are the main catalyst (Everend). Many corporations are involved in cultural production thus creating their own world culture and value system. This value system is based on consumerism (like buying sports shoes) and the triumph of individual consumer agency over collective economic practices (like free education). The end of the east-west logic of the Cold War ended the eighty-year ideological wrestle between centralised state economic planning and market driven models. Eric Hobsbawn, in his masterful empirical history, The Age of Extremes, claims that what we understand as the Twentieth Century ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union (Hobsbawn). What we are left with is a world with only one major superpower, one major economic model, and one major Liberal ideology that is increasing the wealth gap between and within societies everywhere (Landes). We do need to urgently understand the forces beyond the nation state, but this should not be at the expense of a political engagement with the democratic processes that make up the nation state. The utopian-libertarian critique of the turn of the century globalisation protest movement was far too simplistic. The Twentieth Century often disastrously taught us that ideas of the nation can be interpreted in many ways, and likewise, ideas of ‘the global’ are contested meta-structures that can be multifariously interpreted. There are no effortless solutions to understanding globalisation processes and those that tell us what the ‘global’ is largely control what it is. This is similar to the history of Australia. Historically Australia has had different ways to see ourselves based on what group has been in power and the particular requirements of this group. The requirements of an elite group of Australians at the moment is perhaps no government at all so that ‘the people’ can consume in peace and not have bothersome local governments do nasty ‘state-authoritarian’ things like build kindergartens or repair street lights. If ‘the people’ loose faith in citizen based democracy then we undermine the only real power that we have as individuals. The simple act of many activists to communicate between various countries and exchange ideas and strategies is not end in itself; it is merely one component of a significant beginning. If we don’t have a major war, or an economic catastrophe, globalisation will probably further arrive over the next few decades. And we need to have representative, fair, collective and geographically specific processes to deal with this. Most of the collective institutional solutions we already have, and it is up to a new generation to take control of their democratic inheritance (like every other generation before us) rather than conjure one-dimensional utopian-libertarian visions that are oppressively close to those of the WTO. Works Cited www.milkbar.com.au Birnbauer, William and Guerrera, Orietta “Rich Shun Easter Suburbs for Inner City” in The Age, Melbourne, June 18. 2002, <http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/17/1023864403482.php> (Accessed 11 May, 2003) Colbatch, Tim “Part-time work spawns rural underclass” in The Age, 26 April 2003, <http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2003/04/25/1050777401... ...309.htm> (Accessed 27 April, 2003) Everand, Jerry Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation State,Routledge, London, 2000. Hobsbawn, Eric Age of Extremes: The short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Abacus, London, 1994. Jones, Barry Sleepers Wake: Technology and the Future of Work, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982. Klein, Naomi No Logo, Flamingo, London, 2000. Landes, Richard S The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, WW Norton, New York, 1999. Links http://www.milkbar.com.au http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/17/1023864403482.html http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2003/04/25/1050777401309.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Bellamy, Craig. "Post-Logo " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/13-postlogo.php>. APA Style Bellamy, C. (2003, Jun 19). Post-Logo . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/13-postlogo.php>

IntroductionIn Britain, hunger is often hidden in the privacy of the home. Yet otherwise private hunger is currently being rendered public and visible in the growing queues at charity-run food banks, where emergency food parcels are distributed directly to those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families adequately (Downing et al.; Caplan). Food banks, in providing emergency relief to those in need, are responses to crisis moments, actualised through an embodied feeling of hunger that cannot be alleviated. The growing queues at food banks not only render hidden hunger visible, but also serve as reminders of the corporeal vulnerability of the human body to political and socio-economic shifts.A consideration of corporeality allows us to view the world through the lived experiences of the body. Human beings are “creatures of the flesh” who understand and reason, act and interact with their environments through the body (Johnson 81). The growing academic interest in corporeality signifies what Judith Butler calls a “new bodily ontology” (2). However, as Butler highlights, the body is also vulnerable to injury and suffering. An application of this ontology to hunger draws attention to eating as essential to life, so the denial of food poses an existential threat to health and ultimately to survival. The body’s response to threat is the physiological experience of hunger as a craving or longing that is the “most bodily experience of need […] a visceral desire locatable in a void” in which an empty stomach “initiates” a series of sounds and pangs that “call for action” in the form of eating (Anderson 27). Food bank queues serve as visible public reminders of this precariousness and of how social conditions can limit the ability of individuals to feed themselves, and so respond to an existential threat.Corporeal vulnerability made visible elicits responses that support societal interventions to feed the hungry, or that stigmatise hungry people by withdrawing or disparaging what limited support is available. Responses to vulnerability therefore evoke nurture and care or violence and abuse, and so in this sense are ambiguous (Butler; Cavarero). The responses are also normative, shaped by social and cultural understandings of what hunger is, what its causes are, and whether it is seen as originating in personal or societal failings. The stigmatising of individuals by blaming them for their hunger is closely allied to the feelings of shame that lie at the “irreducible absolutist core” of the idea of poverty (Sen 159). Shame is where the “internally felt inadequacies” of the impoverished individual and the “externally inflicted judgments” of society about the hungry body come together in a “co-construction of shame” (Walker et al. 5) that is a key part of the lived experience of hunger. The experience of shame, while common, is far from inevitable and is open to resistance (see Pickett; Foucault); shame can be subverted, turned from the hungry body and onto the society that allows hunger to happen. Who and what are deemed responsible are shaped by shifting ideas and contested understandings of hunger at a particular moment in time (Vernon).This exploration of corporeal vulnerability through food banks as a historically located response to hunger offers an alternative to studies which privilege representations, objectifying the body and “treating it as a discursive, textual, iconographic and metaphorical reality” while neglecting understandings derived from lived experiences and the responses that visible vulnerabilities elicit (Hamilakis 99). The argument made in this paper calls for a critical reconsideration of classic political economy approaches that view hunger in terms of a class struggle against the material conditions that give rise to it, and responses that ultimately led to the construction of the welfare state (Vernon). These political economy approaches, in focusing on the structures that lead to hunger and that respond to it, are more closed than Butler’s notion of ambiguous and constantly changing social responses to corporeal vulnerability. This paper also challenges the dominant tradition of nutrition science, which medicalises hunger. While nutrition science usefully draws attention to the physiological experiences and existential threat posed by acute hunger, the scientific focus on the “anatomical functioning” of the body and the optimising of survival problematically separates eating from the social contexts in which hunger is experienced (Lupton 11, 12; Abbots and Lavis). The focus in this article on the corporeal vulnerability of hunger interweaves contested representations of, and ideas about, hunger with the physiological experience of it, the material conditions that shape it, and the lived experiences of deprivation. Food banks offer a lens onto these experiences and their complexities.Food Banks: Deprivation Made VisibleSince the 1980s, food banks have become the fastest growing charitable organisations in the wealthiest countries of North America, Europe, and Australasia (Riches), but in Britain they are a recent phenomenon. The first opened in 2000, and by 2014, the largest operator, the Trussell Trust, had over 420 franchised food banks, and more recently was opening more than one per week (Lambie-Mumford et al.; Lambie-Mumford and Dowler). British food banks hand out emergency food relief directly to those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families adequately, and have become new sites where deprivation is materialised through a congregation of hungry people and the distribution of food parcels. The food relief parcels are intended as short-term immediate responses to crisis moments felt within the body when the individual cannot alleviate hunger through their own resources; they are for “emergency use only” to ameliorate individual crisis and acute vulnerability, and are not intended as long-term solutions to sustained, chronic poverty (Perry et al.). The need for food banks has emerged with the continued shrinkage of the welfare state, which for the past half century sought to mediate the impact of changing individual and social circumstances on those deemed to be most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. The proliferation of food banks since the 2009 financial crisis and the increased public discourse about them has normalised their presence and naturalised their role in alleviating acute food poverty (Perry et al.).Media images of food bank queues and stacks of tins waiting to be handed out (Glaze; Gore) evoke collective memories from the early twentieth century of hunger marches in protest at government inaction over poverty, long queues at soup kitchens, and the faces of gaunt, unemployed war veterans (Vernon). After the Second World War, the spectre of communism and the expansionist agenda of the Soviet Union meant such images of hunger could become tools in a propaganda war constructed around the failure of the British state to care for its citizens (Field; Clarke et al; Vernon). The 1945 Labour government, elected on a social democratic agenda of reform in an era of food rationing, responded with a “war on want” based on the normative premise that no one should be without food, medical care, shelter, warmth or work. Labour’s response was the construction of the modern welfare state.The welfare state signified a major shift in ideational understandings of hunger. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ideas about hunger had been rooted in a moralistic account of divine punishment for individual failure (Vernon). Bodily experiences of hunger were seen as instruments for disciplining the indigent into a work ethic appropriate for a modern industrialised economy. The infamous workhouses, finally abolished in 1948, were key sites of deprivation where restrictions on how much food was distributed served to punish or discipline the hungry body into compliance with the dominant work ethic (Vernon; Foucault). However, these ideas shifted in the second half of the nineteenth century as the hungry citizen in Britain (if not in its colonies) was increasingly viewed as a victim of wider forces beyond the control of the individual, and the notion of disciplining the hungry body in workhouses was seen as reprehensible. A humanitarian treatment of hunger replaced a disciplinarian one as a more appropriate response to acute need (Shaw; Vernon). Charitable and reformist organisations proliferated with an agenda to feed, clothe, house, and campaign on behalf of those most deprived, and civil society largely assumed responsibility for those unable to feed themselves. By the early 1900s, ideas about hunger had begun to shift again, and after the Second World War ideational changes were formalised in the welfare state, premised on a view of hunger as due to structural rather than individual failure, hence the need for state intervention encapsulated in the “cradle to grave” mantra of the welfare state, i.e. of consistent care at the point of need for all citizens for their lifetime (see Clarke and Newman; Field; Powell). In this context, the suggestion that Britons could go to bed hungry because they could not afford to feed themselves would be seen as the failure of the “war on want” and of an advanced modern democracy to fulfil its responsibilities for the welfare of its citizens.Since the 1980s, there has been a retreat from these ideas. Successive governments have sought to rein in, reinvent or shrink what they have perceived as a “bloated” welfare state. In their view this has incentivised “dependency” by providing benefits so generous that the supposedly work-shy or “skivers” have no need to seek employment and can fund a diet of takeaways and luxury televisions (Howarth). These stigmatising ideas have, since the 2009 financial crisis and the 2010 election, become more entrenched as the Conservative-led government has sought to renew a neo-liberal agenda to shrink the welfare state, and legitimise a new mantra of austerity. This mantra is premised on the idea that the state can no longer afford the bloated welfare budget, that responsible government needs to “wean” people off benefits, and that sanctions imposed for not seeking work or for incorrectly filling in benefit claim forms serve to “encourage” people into work. Critics counter-argue that the punitive nature of sanctions has exacerbated deprivation and contributed to the growing use of food banks, a view the government disputes (Howarth; Caplan).Food Banks as Sites of Vulnerable CorporealityIn these shifting contexts, food banks have proliferated not only as sites of deprivation but also as sites of vulnerable corporeality, where people unable to draw on individual resources to respond to hunger congregate in search of social and material support. As growing numbers of people in Britain find themselves in this situation, the vulnerable corporeality of the hungry body becomes more pervasive and more visible. Hunger as a lived experience is laid bare in ever-longer food bank queues and also through the physiological, emotional and social consequences graphically described in personal blogs and in the testimonies of food bank users.Blogger Jack Monroe, for example, has recounted giving what little food she had to her child and going to bed hungry with a pot of ginger tea to “ease the stomach pains”; saying to her curious child “I’m not hungry,” while “the rumblings of my stomach call me a liar” (Monroe, Hunger Hurts). She has also written that her recourse to food banks started with the “terrifying and humiliating” admission that “you cannot afford to feed your child” and has expressed her reluctance to solicit the help of the food bank because “it feels like begging” (Monroe, Austerity Works?). Such blog accounts are corroborated in reports by food bank operators and a parliamentary enquiry which told stories of mothers not eating for days after being sanctioned under the benefit system; of children going to school hungry; of people leaving hospital after a major operation unable to feed themselves since their benefits have been cut; of the elderly having to make “hard choices” between “heat or eat” each winter; and of mixed feelings of relief and shame at receiving food bank parcels (All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry; Beattie; Cooper and Dumpleton; Caplan; Perry et al.). That is, two different visibilities have emerged: the shame of standing or being seen to stand in the food bank queue, and blogs that describe these feelings and the lived experience of hunger – both are vulnerable and visible, but in different ways and in different spaces: the physical or material, and the virtual.The response of doctors to the growing evidence of crisis was to warn that there were “all the signs of a public health emergency that could go unrecognised until it is too late to take preventative action,” that progress made against food poverty since the 1960s was being eroded (Ashton et al. 1631), and that the “robust last line of defence against hunger” provided by the welfare state was failing (Loopstra et al. n.p). Medical professionals thus sought to conscript the rhetorical resources of their professional credibility to highlight that this is a politically created public health crisis.This is not to suggest that acute hunger was absent for 50 years of the welfare state, but that with the closure of the last workhouses, the end of hunger marches, and the shutting of the soup kitchens by the 1950s, it became less visible. Over the past decade, hunger has become more visible in images of growing queues at food banks and stacked tins ready to be handed out by volunteers (Glaze; Gore) on production of a voucher provided on referral by professionals. Doctors, social workers or teachers are therefore tasked with discerning cases of need, deciding whose need is “genuine” and so worthy of food relief (see Downing et al.). The voucher system is regulated by professionals so that food banks are open only to those with a public identity constructed around bodily crisis. The sense of something as intimate as hunger being defined by others contrasts to making visible one’s own hunger through blogging. It suggests again how bodies become caught up in wider political struggles where not only is shame a co-construction of internal inadequacies and external judgements, but so too is hunger, albeit in different yet interweaving ways. New boundaries are being established between those who are deprived and those who are not, and also between those whose bodies are in short-term acute crisis, and those whose bodies are in long-term and chronic crisis, which is not deemed to be an emergency. It is in this context that food banks have also become sites of demarcation, shame, and contestation.Public debates about growing food bank queues highlight the ambiguous nature of societal responses to the vulnerability of hunger made visible. Government ministers have intensified internal shame in attributing growing food bank queues to individual inadequacies, failure to manage household budgets (Gove), and profligate spending on luxury (Johnston; Shipton). Civil society organisations have contested this account of hunger, turning shame away from the individual and onto the government. Austerity reforms have, they argue, “torn apart” the “basic safety net” of social responses to corporeal vulnerability put in place after the Second World War and intended to ensure that no-one was left hungry or destitute (Bingham), their vulnerability unattended to. Furthermore, the benefit sanctions impose punitive measures that leave families with “nothing” to live on for weeks. Hungry citizens, confronted with their own corporeal vulnerability and little choice but to seek relief from food banks, echo the Dickensian era of the workhouse (Cooper and Dumpleton) and indict the UK government response to poverty. Church leaders have called on the government to exercise “moral duty” and recognise the “acute moral imperative to act” to alleviate the suffering of the hungry body (Beattie; see also Bingham), and respond ethically to corporeal vulnerability with social policies that address unmet need for food. However, future cuts to welfare benefits mean the need for relief is likely to intensify.ConclusionThe aim of this paper was to explore the vulnerable corporeality of hunger through the lens of food banks, the twenty-first-century manifestations of charitable responses to acute need. Food banks have emerged in a gap between the renewal of a neo-liberal agenda of prudent government spending and the retreat of the welfare state, between struggles over resurgent ideas about individual responsibility and deep disquiet about wider social responsibilities. Food banks as sites of deprivation, in drawing attention to a newly vulnerable corporeality, potentially pose a threat to the moral credibility of the neo-liberal state. The threat is highlighted when the taboo of a hungry body, previously hidden because of shame, is being challenged by two new visibilities, that of food bank queues and the commentaries on blogs about the shame of having to queue for food.ReferencesAbbots, Emma-Jayne, and Anna Lavis. Eds. Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters between Foods and Bodies. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry. “Feeding Britain.” 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <https://foodpovertyinquiry.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/food>.Anderson, Patrick. “So Much Wasted:” Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance. 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The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html>. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McNair, Brian. "Vote!." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>. APA Style McNair, B. (Apr. 2008) "Vote!," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>.

The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. < http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html >. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006.